Gmail is quite something

[Hakan Koseoglu]

Hi Karl,
Karl F. Larsen said the following on 29/11/08 12:54:
>     Yes it is. It appears that what happens to the email here and on my 
> laptop happens on my Gmail site. It has made several IMAP directories 
> and I need to understand those. The usual ones are clear.
Google has some special functionality like showing you all mails (in their terminology, deleting a mail used to be just archiving it and then it wouldn't be visible in your inbox but still could be found in "All Mails" folder. Also the Sent folder is different than Thunderbird's. This is a quick fix in Thunderbird (edit -> Account Settings -> Copies and Folder -> Place a copy in: Other (then select google's sent mail folder). Same with the drafts, you can use Google's Draft folder as opposed to local draft folder.

When you delete a mail using IMAP, the only thing that happens is its labels get removed (effectively archived since it won't have the Inbox label either). To truly delete a mail, you need to move it to Gmail/Trash imap folder. You can set this as the default behaviour in Thunderbird using a rule (a good example was posted a couple of days ago).

One more thing, if you have a laptop and travel around w/o any Wifi and want to keep a local copy - usually IMAP only downloads headers and requests the message when clicked on) go to Edit -> Account Settings -> Offline & Disc Space -> Select folders for offline use and select the folders you would like to download.